Peace for the New Year
by Kathleen Lagana
At the end of 2019 as we enter into the holiday season, I am receiving beautiful greeting cards wishing peace and joy. The greeting is a gift that washes over all of us and makes the world a bit kinder. In a recent LinkedIn posting by Dr. Deepak Chopra. “Finding Peace This Time of Year” (Dec 9, 2019), he gives us a nine point personal agenda for finding peace for the holidays. So I decided to try on the agenda items and found most of them fit for year round living. For example, when it comes to gratitude, I have had a fortunate life. Nursing has given me a sound and satisfying profession, providing the opportunity to share in the joy of human birth and to comfort families. As nursing has grown as a profession, so has the opportunity to make a decent living. I have been gifted with a long engaging marriage, a musician son who brings art into my life, and two remarkable young granddaughters, exhausting in their lust and angst for life. Chopra’s first agenda item, (1) raising “appreciation quotient” asks for more than gratitude; it asks us to show our goodwill and appreciation toward humankind which requires an opening of the heart to vulnerability. It requires us (2) to be other-oriented and (3) to practice empathy. I am reminded of something Sister Mary Brian Kelber my friend and colleague at University of San Francisco told me years ago when I lamented that I need to volunteer more. She said “You don’t need to volunteer - you are a nurse - you will go to heaven.” Nursing is about serving others and acting on the empathy that is the essence and practice of a healing profession. So in my analysis so far, I am pretty satisfied with Dr. Chopra’s agenda.
Dr. Chopra’s next agenda item for finding peace this time of year asks that we (4) be easy on ourselves. During my doctoral research fieldwork I had a coffee cup that was my constant late night thinking and writing companion. It held the words “Perfect Cup of Coffee”. It reminded me that perfection was a very tall order - one that I was not sure I could fill - and that the best I should do was to tell the truth in my research. Never perfect - always leaving room for future research recommendations. But perhaps my greatest understanding on self-care was Chopra’s recommendation to (5) avoid toxicity and “to walk away as soon as you can”. Regardless of from whom, what or where one is walking, this is perhaps the hardest thing for nurses to do. Hope springs eternal in a nurse’s healing heart, but the toll is very high for failure to recognize that some toxicity is outside our “scope of practice”. Other agenda items (6) setting limits, (7) watching for reactionary responses, and (8) looking for new and healthier responses are all just plain hard but needed personal work for healthcare providers.
Ultimately, it is Dr. Chopra’s ninth agenda item “to focus on the spiritual, the uplifting side of things” that offers the greatest hope for peace as we move toward the new year. Searching for inspiration is the work of the season. He suggests that inspiration is based in the human need to feel a higher presence and thus our ability to spark our own higher presence and the experience of joy. How we all get to that place is very personal but it is grounded in those things that lift us up; that is a great place to be. Personally, I am heading to Maui in a few days, where humpback whales come this time of year to give birth and the Hawaiian language does not have a word for stress. As another year comes to a close, we can all seek joy and peace with the clarity and presence of “2020” vision.
The Associates at Lagana Healthcare Consulting wish peace and joy to everyone!